From raging Trump to a manic magpie, the pick of 2020
(plus Craig’s own cracker that he’s too modest to mention)
Thi s year has been a strange one for the world of books. Covid meant t hat bookshops were closed for much of the time, which meant that readers were denied the joy of browsing, and the affiliated pleasure of judging books by their covers.
In turn, we authors were denied most of the usual ego-boosts normally associated with a new book: no launch parties, no literary festivals, no search, fruitless or otherwise, for your book on the shelves of Waterstones, no trips to out-of-the-way radio studios for a two-minute interview on BBC Radio Umbrage.
The upside of it all was that more books were read than ever before. It was often said that comfort reading was all the rage – but then again, most books provide some form of comfort. Even books about serial killers and man-eating monsters and natural disasters can prove very comforting for readers tucked up safely in bed.
This may have explained why 2020 saw such an upsurge in books about Donald Trump: the grand total now stands at well over a thousand. Quite a few were written by people he had recently fired. In retaliation, Trump joined the rarefied world of book reviewers by posting his assessments on Twitter. It turned out that he was an ungenerous critic, calling his former national security adviser, John Bolton (The Room Where It Happened), ‘ one of the dumbest people I’ve met’; the former FBI director James Comey (A Higher Loyalty) ‘ a sleazebag’; and the book written by his former lawyer Michael Cohen (Disloyal: A Memoir) ‘a total lie!’.
All in all, it must have been a busy reading year for Trump: he was also furious with his niece, Mary L. Trump, for publishing her unloving memoir, Too Much And Never Enough: How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man. His Twitter review accused her of saying ‘untruthful things about my wonderful parents (who couldn’t stand her!)’.
Andrew Gimson’s wonderfully snappy pen-portraits in Gimson’s Presidents: Brief Lives From Washington To Trump (Square Peg, £ 10. 99) contradicted those who consider Donald Trump a 21st Century aberration. It seems that, over the years, the White House has been home to any number of rogues, charlatans, bullies and braggarts. And quiet, retiring types, too: President Coolidge was known as Silent Cal, because he said so little.
At a White House party, a woman told Coolidge a friend had bet her she couldn’t get him to say more than two words. ‘You lose,’ he replied.
Our own politicians can seem tame by comparison with Trump and his gang, though this year both the former Speaker and t he wife of a Tory MP did their best to be outrageous. In February, John Bercow published Unspeakable, a comically self- regarding memoir in which he lambasted, among many others, all the recent leaders of the Tory Party – William Hague: ‘robotic, cold and uninspiring’; Michael Howard: ‘profoundly unattractive’; David Cameron: ‘ sniffy, supercilious and deeply snobbish’; and Theresa May: ‘As wooden as your average coffee table’. Small wonder, then, that his peerage got lost in the post.
In Diary Of An MP’s Wife, Sasha Swire also blasted ‘ humourless’ Theresa May and William Hague (‘only ever interested in himself’) and Boris Johnson (‘ driven by jealousy’). She also thought John Bercow ‘revolting’, a ‘little weasel’ and a ‘little goblin’. She dutifully gushed over her pal David Cameron, though I doubt he’ll thank her for portraying him, in her hamfisted way, as a Hooray Henry, flirty and laddish.
One of the most shunned books of the year also happened to be one of the most interesting. Staff at Woody Allen’s original publishers refused to have anything to do with his autobiography, so it was published a few weeks later by a small independent.
Two-thirds light comedy to one third horror, Apropos Of Nothing ( Arcade Publishing, £ 20) begins with a jaunty stroll through his early years as a gag-writer, then as a stand-up. Allen is almost manically self-deprecatory, poking fun at those who mistake him for an intellectual. ‘I don’t have an intellectual neuron in my head… I have no insights, no lofty thoughts. What I do have, however, is a pair of black-rimmed glasses.’
Then, roughly halfway through, the wisecracks stop. His partner o f many years, Mia Farrow, accuses him of child abuse. Across a hundred or so furious pages, he denies the charges and offers convincing evidence of Farrow’s malice. If he is, indeed, innocent – and two successive investigations have cleared his name – then our current cancel culture has treated an elderly comic genius very badly. ‘I’m eighty-four,’ he jokes at
one point .‘ My life is almost half over.’
This year, three wonderful writers explored mysteries at the heart of their own families. In House Of Glass: The Story And Secrets Of A Twentieth-Century Jewish Family ( Fourth Estate, £ 16.99), Hadley Freeman traced the different destinies of her grandmother and her grandmother’s three brothers.
Driven by antisemitism from Poland to Paris after the First World War, they then faced annihilation at the hands of the Nazis in the 1940s.
Which of them lived, and which of them died? It’ s an extraordinary story, told with equal amounts of zest and sympathy, in which fate seems inextricably intertwined with character; in those dark days, it didn’t pay to be too trusting.
Ferdinand Mount’s sad and delightful Kiss Myself Goodbye (Bloomsbury Continuum, £20) is all about his Aunt Munca, who was chauffeured around in a chocolate-coloured Mercedes coupé with the number plate URA 1.
Now in his 80s, Mount ount fondly remembers her as a larger-than-life figure ,‘ unlike anyone else I have met, alarming and warm at the same time, in an electrifying way’. After she died, he realised he had no idea who she was, or where she came from. On closer investigation, it turned out that Aunt Munca’s whole adult life was a flamboyant flight from shame.
First- time author Charlie Gilmour wrote a fine memoir of his troubled adolescence, centred around a magpie he found in a South London gutter‘ lurching towards the kerb like a drunk staggering down an alleyway’.
Perhaps recognising something of himself in the bird, Charlie took it into his home. Within weeks it was ruling the roost, dive-bombing visitors (particularly women), stealing lighters and coins and safety pins, and tucking gobbets of raw meat in socks, boots and the USB port of Charlie’s laptop. It even tried to peck the contact lenses out of a visitor’s eyes.
Yet for all its manic hooliganism, the magpie was also Charlie’s salvation. It offered him a focus, a way of rising above his rejection by his self-centred old hippy father, the poet Heathcote Williams. Featherhood (W&N, £16.99) might sound like just another misery memoir but it is much, much more than that: a delicately choreographed story of salvation through a bird, with echoes of Barry Hines’s classic A Kestrel For A Knave.
Similar mayhem was wrought by a poltergeist that inhabited a modest house in Croydon in 1938, when Britain was on the brink of war. Within a matter of days, 36 tumblers, 24 wine glasses, 15 egg cups, four saucers a and a pot of face cream ended up in smithereens.
In a sharp and eerie book, The T Haunting Of Alma Fielding: A True Ghost Story ( Bloomsbury Circus, £18.99), Kate Summerscale tells the extraordinary tale of a woman possessed, those who believed in her, and those who had their doubts.
The cheeriest book of the year was undoubtedly British Summer Time Begins: The School Summer Holidays 1930 -1980, by Ysenda Maxtone Graham (Little, Brown, £18.99), a richly entertaining portrait of what children did when there was nothing to do, before the arrival of all- day telly and iPhones and laptops.
‘Whatever you were doing,’ writes Maxtone Graham, ‘you did it interminably.’ Anyone who remembers Spam sandwiches, Chinese burns, pervy uncles and Space Hoppers will find it a hoot, a pin- sharp evocation of a lost world.